“But we do have a cute, furry orange raccoon to
counteract the bleakness,” adds Simpson, referring to Spiffo, The Indie Stone’s mascot. Star of debut game PAWS, Spiffo is essentially
Zomboid’s take on Fallout’s Vault Boy and is indicative of the humour that infuses and informs Project Zomboid and how the studio interacts with the community. Once you imbibe the sentiment that Spiffo represents, you almost get the game itself. It’s why rather than seeking out hordes of zombies which they can never hope to outnumber, players take pride in the little things that the game allows, such as collecting and displaying garden gnomes, or being creative in how a character might eliminate or avoid a threat. After all, these are the only pursuits that would keep any citizen of a zombie apocalypse alive or sane. As unlikely as it might seem, there is a distinct Animal Crossing vibe to Project Zomboid, though its baked-in pandemic is one players should seek to embrace rather than escape from. “Er, if you say so,” says Simpson.
SLOW AND STEADY More than its unique tone and the depth to its apocalyptic sandbox of features, what stands out about Project Zomboid is the story of its development. It’s a game that remains one of the longest to have remained in early access on Steam, yet it joined Early Access comparatively late, in November 2013. The very first release was in 2011, before the term early access had become widespread. Amusingly, the first playable release was referred to as Minecraft-style in terms of its availability, which was via the now-defunct Desura rather than Steam. Indeed, the creator of Minecraft was an early fan of Zomboid, and promoted the game in Minecraft’s iconic splash texts. “It said ‘Try Project Zomboid’ and it actually brought
quite a few people to the game,” says Siu-Chong. “Yeah, there’s a lot of people who helped us get
Zomboid’s name out and I don’t think we’d be where we are if we didn’t get that sort of attention,” adds Simpson. This was of course before the rise of Kickstarter, a
bandwagon that The Indie Stone was a little too early to jump aboard, with Zomboid already being available. “Not only that, but I believe for a good period of time you needed a US bank account to do Kickstarter,” recalls Simpson. “I don’t think it was really on the table for us anyway. We were never making big money, but it seemed like it at the time and it was enough to keep our small studio ticking along.” Instead, the team turned to Greenlight on Steam, the
precursor to Early Access: “I guess we had very lucky timing,” says Siu-Chong. “Basically every time Steam
20 | MCV/DEVELOP May 2022
issued something new, we were able to be a part of it. We were able to get by without having to think that we have to get a publisher for us to be able to fund things. We were able to remain independent.” “I think a big thing with us is our ‘slow and steady
wins the race’, ‘be the tortoise, not the hare’ philosophy,” says Simpson. “We were in the first batch of greenlit games on Steam, but we didn’t go on Steam through Greenlight until early access was a thing. And then we took a year and a half of trying to get the game ready to go on Steam because we wanted to make a good impression rather than just jump in as soon as we could.”
GRAVE ROBBERS It was just after The Indie Stone had begun discussions to get Project Zomboid on Steam that the team faced something of a setback, one that could have ended work on the game and closed the studio. It was October 2011 and Simpson had just moved
into a new apartment in Newcastle with Indie Stone’s other co-founder Andy Hodgetts. “It was a nice big secure apartment,” says Simpson. “It was like ‘right, we’re moving out of our dingy little flat. We’re in this nice secure building now’ and ironically we get burgled before the internet’s connected.” The thieves stole a number of laptops, which had the development builds and on-site backups, but because the team had no reliable internet (having to use mobile data dongles), weeks of work was lost. That wasn’t the worst of it. Simpson and the team quickly shared their frustrations online and the response was far from reassuring. “We got quite a lot of venom from some of the
community,” recalls Siu-Chong. “A lot of people were very supportive, but a lot were very angry. That caused the setback more than anything else.” “It was like a dark fog for months that was very hard
to come out the other side of,” says Simpson. “We lost more time to demoralisation than we did actually having lost work. We lost like a month of work. It wouldn’t have taken long to get back there, but it was just the fog of feeling like your chance has been missed and it’s all doomed and everyone hates us. It wasn’t pleasant. It felt very unfair at the time, but we can understand why people who had paid money were frustrated.” The theft was the third bad thing to happen in 2011,
after Google freezing payments earlier in the year, then the team finding that pirates had hacked the game so that it updated from the legitimate version, potentially crippling the studio since it was charged money for every download. “The piracy stuff seems completely trivial now,” says Simpson. “I think we made
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